Sinfully Ever After (Book Club Belles Society) (10 page)

She regarded Luke slowly, from head to toe, taking in his grimy coat, his scars, his muddy boots, and all his frayed edges. “I look forward to hearing your advice, sir,” she replied with ponderous gravity.

He squared his shoulders. “It might not seem as if I have much to offer, young madam. But I have knowledge to share. Oh, I know you’ve had the finest governesses money can buy and schoolroom lessons on every subject fit to be taught, Sarah, but I can tell you about life.” He would like to do that, he thought suddenly. As with many of his ideas, it came to him in the midst of his sentence and before he’d even thought the details through, but perhaps he
could
be of use to the girl. “Not everything can be learned in the schoolroom. In fact, most important lessons in life you won’t read about in one of those books. I have thirty-seven years of experience to share with you.”

She jumped down from the pile of stones, not waiting for his help. “That will be nice, I’m sure, sir.”

Like his brother, she was achingly polite.

“There are a great many things a young lady should know,” he assured her.

“Sakes! You’re not going to tell me about
men
, are you?”

“Men?”

“Isn’t that the sort of thing a parent is supposed to lecture me about?”

Luke frowned. “You don’t need to know about men yet. Not until you marry.”

She reminded him, “I shall be sixteen soon.”

“Hmph. Just a child.”

“Hardly, Colonel! Some girls my age are married already.”

Not
on
my
watch
, he thought with an angry sniff. Too many rakes out there, and he should know. Ah yes, now he saw how he could be of use to this girl. “There’ll be time enough for all that when you’re five-and-twenty. Ten years from now.”

“Five-and-twenty?” She pressed her lips together and her eyes grew even larger. “I’ll be an old lady then.”

“Or even five-and-thirty,” he added gruffly, looking away so he wouldn’t be tempted to laugh.

Ness growled again at the pig through the fence. Sir Mortimer looked up from his trough and snorted. As the pig swung his hindquarters around and flicked his curled tail, a spatter of mud from the end of it landed on the dog’s snub nose.

Luke whistled for Ness. The dog stood, shook his head, took one last, long glare at the pig, and then followed them back toward the house, still grumbling softly, the noise vibrating through the stout folds and flaps of his body with every pad of his large feet across the snowy ground.

Sarah followed, still swinging her bucket. “Were you never curious about me, Colonel, in all these years?”

“Well, I knew you couldn’t be…” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “You were better off here under your uncle’s care. It would have been selfish of me to intervene, as he was doing such a good job of raising you. Far better than I might have done back then.”
That
much
is
true
, he thought, much to his chagrin. He may find his brother an irritating, constipated fellow, but Darius had kept Sarah safe all these years and looked after her, when he could have hidden her away in a ladies’ academy somewhere. Instead he had kept her at home, ignoring her illegitimacy, acknowledging her as family. And he had probably managed all this while facing fierce opposition from their stepmother, who cared about few things more than appearances and the opinion of “fine society.”

She gazed up at him, unblinking. “Uncle Darius says you were irresponsible, disorganized, reckless”—she counted them off on her fingers—“thoughtless, and unprincipled. He didn’t say it to me, but I overheard him tell Aunt Jussy. Is that why you left me behind?”

He struggled for a reply. “I was not prepared for parenthood. I had my own growing up to do.”

“And now you are done growing up?”

I’d better be
, he mused, starting to perspire under her steady questioning. “Is anyone ever
done
, I wonder?”

She considered for a moment. Then another question burst out of her. “Will you take me to the assemblies in the new year?”

“The assemblies?”

“In the town of Manderson. There will be dances held there in the new year. Aunt Jussy said I may go if you approve. Uncle Darius was going to escort us there, but now he says he can hand that duty over to you and he seemed quite relieved about it.”

Luke grimaced, for the word “dances” held no more thrill for him than they did for his brother. “We’ll see.”

“What happened to your leg?”

“An old wound.”

She stopped and looked at him again in that somber way. “You should see Dr. Penny, Aunt Jussy’s papa. He lives here in Hawcombe Prior and he’s very nice.”

“I’m sure he is.”

Suddenly Sarah said, “If you mean to share your vast wisdom with me, sir, perhaps you will allow me to help you in return, in whatever small way I can?”

“And just how—?”

“You need a shave and a hair trim, and you definitely need some of my uncle’s clean clothes. Also your boots need a polish.” While he was still thinking of a response to this curt appraisal, she added firmly, “The ladies of Hawcombe Prior are quite particular. You wouldn’t want to disappoint them, would you?”

He didn’t give a damn what the ladies of Hawcombe Prior thought of him. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her that, but he found his mouth unable to form those words. Not with this girl gazing up at him, with her big hopeful eyes and tentative smile. This little girl who thought he was her father.

“There’s a barber in the village,” she added, “although he’s really the cobbler. And if you have a bad tooth, he will pull it for you too.”

“Now that’s what I call convenient.”

Sarah looked down at the dog. “We’ll have to do something about you too, won’t we, poor Ness? I think a bath is in order.”

The animal whimpered and turned his eyes upward to Luke. He knew the feeling. Baths and haircuts? There began the path to an honest man’s—and an honest dog’s—ruin. Women were devious creatures, always wanting to try and drown a fellow in scented water or cut him with scissors. Apparently even at fifteen, they nursed this desire to change a fellow and mold him into a doll.

“Because if you are to be
my
father,” said Sarah solemnly, “I should like you to look decent and respectable at least, Colonel. We may not have a great deal to work with, but we can make the most of it.”

What the devil had he got himself into?

Colonel Brandon was very much in love with Marianne Dashwood. She rather suspected it to be so, on the very first evening of their being together, from his listening so attentively while she sang to them…

“But he talked of flannel waistcoats,” said Marianne; “and with me a flannel waistcoat is invariably connected with aches, cramps, rheumatisms, and every species of ailment that can afflict the old…”

—
Sense
and
Sensibility

When Becky passed through the entrance of Midwitch Manor with her father that evening, she did not have much on her mind beyond finding a chance to talk to Jussy alone. Her friend had been in too much haste to leave and get back to her guest after the book society meeting, so she still hadn’t been able to share her secret and was, by that evening, a piece of dry kindling waiting for a spark.

It was not likely to be a party of many amusements, for it was not all young people. The miserable Mrs. Makepiece would be in attendance to cast her haughty eyes over the new arrival, and Jussy had also invited her parents, Doctor and Mrs. Penny. So all things considered, it was bound to be a rather dull evening with everybody on their “best,” most unnatural behavior. But since Colonel Wainwright, the guest of honor, was an old man of seven-and-thirty, Becky supposed it made sense to invite people of his own generation. Then he would have someone to talk to and would not feel completely out of place.

“I look forward to meeting the fellow,” her father exclaimed as they gave up their coats in the hall. “I have heard much of Colonel Wainwright’s bravery in the field.” Although Becky thought he ought to stay by his fire on such a cold evening, the major had refused to be left out. While there was the prospect of meeting such an interesting new acquaintance, a foot of snow could not keep him indoors.

Becky looked at him doubtfully. “When have you heard anything about the colonel?” The black sheep of the Wainwright family had rarely been mentioned in her presence.

“It was well known in military circles, m’dear, and Mr. Wainwright has told me a great deal about his brother too. I daresay he would tell other people, if they ever listened to the man. But you young girls all make too much noise and poor Mr. Wainwright keeps his thoughts to himself unless they are encouraged out. Even then, one has to be sitting very close to hear them, for he tends to speak mostly when he has the least chance of being heard.”

“Well, I hope the colonel lives up to your expectations, Papa, and that you will make a new friend. Now, do not drink too much eggnog, and if there are mince pies, Papa, do not—”

“My dear girl, let us enjoy ourselves tonight and not fear the malevolent intentions of mince pies. You may fight them off me if I become overwhelmed. Oh, I smell cinnamon…and oranges.”

Unlike her father, Becky had not the slightest hope that the long-lost colonel would be interesting company beyond the novelty of a man returned from the grave. She already had a picture of him in her mind—a short, sturdy, balding fellow with a ruddy, weathered face and possibly a monocle. Oddly enough, she also pictured him as having disproportionately small feet. Where she got that from, she couldn’t say, but her imagination sometimes worked above and beyond the call of duty.

The colonel would, doubtless, be one of those loud, garrulous old soldiers who liked to boast about long-past victories—while he stood before them, balancing his large, barrel-like form on those tiny feet. They entered the drawing room and were immediately surrounded by an embrace of warmth and candlelight. Midwitch Manor, not too long ago a dark, eerie place, dusty and littered with cobwebs, was in the process of being transformed into a comfortable home by the new owners. The Wainwrights hadn’t chased the old ghosts away, so Justina liked to say, but they were learning to live with them in harmony.

Glancing around the drawing room, Becky saw that she and her father were the last to arrive. Miss Sarah Wainwright played at the pianoforte with Lucy sitting beside her to turn the music, although she never performed the service at the right moment, being either too slow or too fast—distracted by a hangnail, or the lace on her sleeve, or whatever plate of delicacies passed her line of sight. Sarah’s frustration was duly taken out on the keys.

The Pennys—Justina’s parents—sat by the fire with Mr. Kenton, the parson, who lectured them on the evils of too much jollity during the Yuletide season. Diana, her mother, and Mrs. Kenton were clustered around a tall, dark stranger who had his back to the door, keeping them all so fascinated by his conversation that no one even looked over to see who had entered the room.

There did not appear to be any man present with outrageously dainty feet.

Only Justina, the hostess of this hastily assembled gathering, noticed the new arrivals and dashed forward to welcome them. “Thank goodness you’re finally here,” she exclaimed, glowing with excitement. “How could you not have told me your news, you wretched woman?”

“My news?”

Justina grabbed her hand. “Don’t try that innocent countenance with me! I knew this morning that you had something on your mind—you were so distracted and fidgety—but I could never have guessed. I always assumed that you and Charles Clarendon…but I suppose you thought it most amusing to hide your engagement to my brother-in-law. And after all that you said to me yesterday about romance and how you prefer to read it than to live it yourself!”

Before Becky could get her stunned tongue in motion, she was hauled across the room, a glass of punch thrust into her hand, and congratulations showered upon her.

Hearing his name called, the tall fellow surrounded by awed ladies turned slowly. Only then did she spy his walking cane. And two dark eyes filled to the brim with sinister heat.

Becky felt the carpet sliding away under her slippers. She almost spilled her punch.

The long-lost Colonel Wainwright bowed his head. “You came at last, Miss Sherringham. Now you can help answer all your friends’ questions, for they have many. You mischievously kept our impending marriage a secret, it seems.”

She could only stare with her mouth open, until Lucky Luke whispered at her to close it.

“You’re a sly thing!” Mrs. Kenton exclaimed in a tone of false jollity. “Fancy not speaking a word of it to any of us. There I was, thinking you a wayward creature indeed to be entertaining a strange man alone in your kitchen last night. I was prepared to chastise you soundly, until Colonel Wainwright explained the circumstances.”

“But I—”

“Miss Sherringham must have been too modest to tell you all of how she ensnared me from the moment we met in Brighton,” said Lucky Luke. “Is that not so, my dear?”

She could hardly breathe. Her stays were pulled too tight.

“Now I have come to make good on my promise,” he said, “and we are to be married.”

Somehow she found words and a tongue to make them. “Dear God, you
are
a madman!”

He laughed loudly, grabbed her free hand, and grazed the gloved tips of her struggling fingers with his teeth. “I did not mean to embarrass you, my dear. Not before your friends. But you should have warned them. I had no idea you’d kept our engagement a secret.”

Everything she thought she knew about him was blown apart, and then the pieces fluttered back to earth, fitting back together in a new way. Lucky Luke had let her think he came there just for her, to collect that stupid debt. Oh, he must have laughed heartily at her expense, especially when she said she’d waited for him to come seeking her out. But he had not come there for her at all. It was nothing more than a coincidence and he had probably never thought of her in five years. She drank her punch in one gulp, and Mrs. Makepiece, in her peripheral vision, clutched the cameo brooch she wore on a velvet ribbon around her throat.

“Thirsty?” the colonel asked, unsmiling. “May I get you another?”

“No, thank you. I had better keep
my
wits intact.”

The
lying
villain
is
“Lucky” indeed
, she thought.
Lucky
I
didn’t have that officer’s pistol in my hand just then
.

Everyone else was standing about rather awkwardly, not certain what to say. Then Justina cried, “I am overjoyed for you,” and embraced her with such violence that Becky was almost swept off her feet. “We shall now be sisters-in-law!”

She rigidly bore her friend’s tight squeeze, glaring over her head at the man who was supposed to be dead.

He’d combed his hair tonight, shaved too, hiding behind a neater facade. He must have borrowed clothes from his brother, for the sleeves of his evening jacket were a little short and his discomfort was evident, as if he could not relax his arms at his sides.

But his dark eyes remained the same, consuming her inch by inch. Each time his smirking, self-satisfied lips disappeared behind the edge of a punch cup, they might as well be planting another kiss upon her thigh, for the resulting interruption to her pulse beat was identical.

Be
calm.
She’d once chased a pickpocket for half a mile through a busy souk and wrestled him successfully to the ground; she’d survived a sinking rowboat on the Nile and lived through the bite on her ankle from a poisonous snake.

Rebecca Boadicea Sherringham was not a woman to be vanquished.

She would take stock of the situation and then assess the best course of action.

Firstly, Lucky Luke could not seriously be contemplating marriage. Last night he’d warned her most adamantly that he was not a marrying man. But now he did this out of a foolish idea of having compromised her reputation.

Secondly, had she not told him already that she handled her own problems?

“I’m sorry,” Becky announced to the gathered ladies, “but there has been a mistake. I am not going to marry the colonel. What you saw last night, Mrs. Kenton, was this man…fixing my boot lace.”

The woman’s eyes widened. “Boot lace?”

There followed a short, awkward silence, and then Lucky Luke laughed. “My dear, you are the very limit. Stop teasing your friends.”

Justina looked forlornly at her but could not quite keep the twinkle of mischief out of her eyes, while Diana demurely lowered her lashes and gracefully raised a fan to hide her mouth. The colonel laughed even louder and then seized her by the arm, steering her quickly off to a corner of the drawing room.

“Let me get you another glass of punch, my sweet.”

* * *

“Boot lace?
Boot
lace?
That was the best you could come up with?”

“Marginally better than a hasty engagement, don’t you think?” she snapped up at him, eyes firing angry hot sparks. “I had only moments to find an excuse and you had almost a full day, since you were privy to certain facts unknown to me,
Colonel
!”

She was getting herself all agitated, Luke observed calmly, noting the quivering pearls in her ears, the heightened color spreading over the pleasant curves of her bosom, and the empty punch cup swinging wildly from her fingers.

“This is all your fault,” she muttered.

“I beg to differ. You’re the one who insisted I kiss you. I would have left without that. I was trying to be a gentleman and strike the debt.”

“A gentleman?” she scoffed. “The debt was
your
idea in the first place, and you said you came here to claim it.”

“Well, that—”

“And I did not give you permission to kiss me…in that way.”

“Forgive me, but I didn’t hear you try to stop me. In fact, as I recall, you rather demanded that I continue.”

“What I do in my kitchen is my business. Augusta Kenton’s spying is her responsibility. As my father would say, if she chooses to pry into other folks’ business, she ought to be prepared for what she might see.”

Forget the idea of a pretty woman sprinkling the flowers at his grave with lovelorn sobs
, he mused, remembering the image that had come into his mind last night; she’d probably be shouting at his corpse for dying without her permission.

“Now I insist you tell them there is no engagement.”

He pressed a hand to his thigh and grimaced. “Ouch. Bloody wound! Takes my breath away sometimes.”

She made no sympathetic move toward him but waited, her lips pursed.

“I warned you, Miss Sherringham! I’m the very worst sort of man to let into your life, into your home, but you wouldn’t pay heed. Now see what happened, eh? I’m doing this for your own good, young lady.”

“Well, don’t keep doing it,
old
man
. I didn’t ask you to. Oh, why did you have to come here? You and your big…
feet
!”

He looked down, puzzled. “My feet?”

She merely shook her head as if it was not worth her breath to explain.

Luke knew they were being watched by the other ladies and gentlemen, who tried to understand what was going on. Her father was the only person not looking; instead the wily major took advantage of the general distraction by refilling his punch cup to the brim and pocketing several mince pies.

Keeping a smile on his face for the benefit of those who watched, Luke addressed her carefully, in a low voice. “What else was I supposed to do when that gimlet-eyed, bacon-faced woman caught us in the act? Within moments of her arrival tonight, she was regaling the entire room with a detailed description of what she saw through your window. She couldn’t have painted you any more scarlet had she a brush and a bucket of blood with which to do it. I didn’t want to be accused of ruining the reputation of yet another young lady. I had to act, for your sake.”

“You needn’t have bothered. You, sir, are the very opposite of everything I expect in a husband, and if you think this is your duty now out of some ridiculous, misplaced sense of—”

“It
is
my duty. I mean to do the proper thing. I came home to make amends, not cause more scandal. I’ve done enough of that in my life.”

Looking up into his face, she appeared to consider this for a moment, seeking the truth in every feature, every line and scar. For the first time in his life, he could look a woman in the eye without having to act, a part, because he had not lied to her. She was unique in that sense.